6 Destructive Ideas Perpetuated in Western Culture

Since the day you emerged into this bizarre, sparkling universe, you’ve been conditioned to think in certain ways.

And
that’s damn wonderful a lot of the time. It’s arguably a blessing that
our minds learn to auto-dismiss certain notions - like, say, walking off
of that cliff or stabbing Uncle Melvin with a butter knife - and
auto-accept others.

But it’s also problematic. Because, well, our minds are gullible - sufficiently
gullible, at least, to spend the first decade or seven of our lives
unconsciously internalizing the dominant ways of thinking of our
culture.

From
our earliest years, we are surrounded by the worldviews of our parents,
our education systems, our economic systems, our governments, our
media, our religious institutions, and myriad other sources of
foundational values and ideas. Depending on one’s culture, this
situation eventually results in significant suffering, as we’ll see.
And arguably this would not be the case if, at a young age, we were
instructed to view all of these sources as reliant on fallible, human ideologies, but this is almost never the case.

Incentives for Claiming to Know the “Truth”

At
least in the United States, my home country, most of these entities are
portrayed, or portray themselves, as possessing and delivering the capital-T Truth.
The media often portrays itself as a “No Spin Zone” and delivers only
firm, declarative statements; the government purports to understand what
is most beneficial “for the people”; religion has access to the “word
of God”; schools teach “the facts”; mama “knows best,” etc. All of this
contributes to a sense that those before us figured everything out, that
we need not ask questions. The “Truth” has already been filed away.

There
are strong incentives, for both individuals and institutions, to claim
to hold or to genuinely believe they hold a monopoly on the “Truth.” One
of those incentives is to protect themselves, their fellow citizens,
and their loved ones from the unknown, or the unknowable. As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote:

Culture
is like an operating system that provides default answers to all of
life’s questions to protect us from the inevitable insecurity and
anxiety that arise when we admit that we know very little about what is
actually going on - about what we are, why we’re here, what we should do,
etc. I would not be so bold as to suggest that this is never a good thing. Culture can aid
us, I think, by providing stabilizing structure where none would
otherwise exist. And some cultural values are surely worthy,
human-friendly ones.

However, in emphasizing a specific set of values,
most cultures (particularly dominator cultures)
seem to become dogmatic - i.e. seem to reach a point where they do not
recognize other ways of seeing and thinking and living than their own
predominant prescriptions. For anyone curious about the truth of our condition or about alternative modi operandi, this can become an absurdly limiting and oppressive state of affairs.

Another
incentive for sources to claim to possess the “Truth” has to do with
rhetoric, persuasion. In an age of expert opinions and fifty million
channels of information, the “Truth” gets people to listen. And everyone
wants an audience, wants to propagate their worldview for its own sake
or for other ends. Convincing people to do and believe what you want
them to do and believe is supremely dependent on presenting yourself or
your organization as wise, enlightened, certain.

No One Has the Answers

But,
as you are hopefully aware, the “Truth” changes, depending on who you
ask. It differs wildly from continent to continent, culture to culture,
institution to institution, family to family, individual to individual.
There are infinite variations on the “Truth.”

It
may follow that truth is utterly subjective, but I’ll save the nihilism
discussion for another day. What’s imperative to realize, here and now,
is that one culture’s truth is another culture’s fiction; and to
consider, furthermore, that much of what has been presented to you as
“True” might be an agenda-driven house of cards - a collection of
misguided, propagandistic faux-facts, some of which lead to despair if
left unchallenged.

I don’t mean to pull a wide-eyed “What if I told you?” stunt
à la the Matrix Morpheus meme. This is just food for thought, and
again, this is not to say that culturally inherited perspectives and
structures can never be useful, meaningful, life-stabilizing,
social-cohesion mechanisms. I think they often are. But I humbly submit
to you that an idea of inconceivable purchase - especially in terms of un-learning certain insidious culturally inherited worldviews - is the idea that no one has the answers. If
we’re honest (which might be a good idea sometimes), every person,
every culture, and every institution tells a story, and everyone’s story
is, at root, relative to their point of view and way of life. Including mine, so don’t take me too seriously.

When
you start to think in this way, you become much more curious and
critical. You begin to take personal responsibility for separating the
strawberries from the smegma - for deciding which ideas are worthwhile and
which are malignant. Presuming you see value in this undertaking, let
me suggest to you (in cute, easily processable listicle-blurbs) that the
following six ideas - ideas prevalent in (though not exclusive to) the
West - are at best unsound and at worst, utterly destructive.

Idea #1: Uncertainty can and should be eliminated from existence.

“Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.”

Federico García Lorca

From our earliest years of schooling, there is a rhetoric of certainty wafting in the air, a notion of control over
knowledge and over events. Year after year, the system has already
determined what’s best for us: first grade to second grade to third
grade, et al. Life has an order, an obvious trajectory.
Schools, experts, and scientists seem, conveniently, to have “the
facts” - everything we need to know about the universe and everything we
need to know to “succeed” (slippery linguistic sign, that one).

By
the time we’re 15 or 16, we’re well-aware of a traditional life-path
narrative in which people go to college, find a nice job, work their way
up in the world, get married, have kids, buy a house, settle down,
retire, die. At the same time, we’re beginning to be bombarded with
terms like “career path,” “next step,” “plan your future,” etc. etc.,
all of which serve to further cement in us the notion that it is
desirable and possible to “figure out” our lives, to schedule them down
to the smallest detail, to eliminate uncertainty.

Eventually,
though, this narrative breaks down. We eat some strange fungi or get
fired or read too much philosophy or break our pelvis or miss a flight
or gaze too long at the stars or our dog dies, and it becomes (perhaps
distressingly) clear that things are not so certain. Existence forever
evades compartmentalization, and countless events, both micro and macro
in scale, occur despite our expectations otherwise. Innumerable
questions defy our understanding. Our efforts to impose certainty and
control onto the universe are attempts to avoid countenancing the
inevitable fear that comes with acknowledging our own physical and
perceptual limitations.

This fear seems to cause many people to need certainty - to
insist that they or someone else (priests, scientists, etc.)
understands How Things Are in some kind of absolute way. I see this as
tragic. It’s as if these people want to take kaleidoscopic, inscrutable,
inarticulable existence and put it in some kind of hermetically sealed
canister in order to feel proud that it’s been contained and dissected
thoroughly. From my perspective, this attitude eliminates or severely
paralyzes one’s ability to really see the living mystery that
surrounds us all the time and to feel what is, I think, the greatest of
feelings - profound astonishment and awe at the fact of one’s own
existence.

Ultimately,
we cannot escape the unknown. It will eventually return to engulf,
torment, and cripple us if we have long suppressed it. For some time,
I’ve aimed to adopt an attitude I dub “dancing with uncertainty.” Rather
than feeling that I need to know anything, I have aimed to embrace that I am immersed in and inseparable from a colossal, mysterious unfolding of being and don’t really know what will occur tomorrow, let alone in five years. I admit that I don’t understand
this whole “life” thing, and from that admission emerges humility,
wonder, curiosity, and an openness to novelty and possibility. I heed
the poet Rilke’s words: “Live the questions.”

Idea #2: You deserve to feel great all the time, and you can.

“This is Bob. Bob
is doing well. Very well indeed. That’s because not long ago with just a
quick phone call Bob realized that he could have something better in
his life.”

You
may have recognized the above ad-copy as that of Enzyte, “Natural Male
Enhancement,” and were unwittingly prompted to imagine “Bob,” that
disturbingly perky boner-boosting poster boy and his eerily exaggerated
inhuman perma-smile. “Bob” is a prime (if a bit extreme) example of an
archetype that is widely propagated by advertisers, self-help “gurus,”
and the hokey, think-positive people who you unfollowed on Facebook for
incessantly posting“Just Be Happy Now” memes.

The
archetype is that of the ever-smiling person - the complete and totally
realized human who has discovered happiness and now just feels so damn
good that they can hardly stand it. In a culture that places an
inestimable premium on individual happiness, it’s comforting to believe
that such an ideal can be realized. It’s also quite lucrative to sell
people an image of themselves attaining the ideal.

But
beneath the glamorous, ever-grinning archetype is a serpentine
subtextual message, a message that can quite literally make you feel as
if something is terribly wrong with you. The message is that happiness
consists in never feeling depressed, lonely, scared, anxious, or
downright shitty. That if we just buy the product or adopt the right
mentality, perpetual Best Days Ever are within reach. But is such a
vision really tenable or the substance of agenda-driven fantasy? My
vote: the latter.

Perhaps “happiness,” if the word means anything at all, means accepting whatever
circumstances or emotions arise. To be human is to experience a vast
spectrum of emotion, and there will always be an ebb and flow.
Remembering to approach all happenings with an attitude of “this too
shall pass” is more valuable than a warehouse full of consumer
quick-fixes.

Furthermore,
as many a thinker has argued, our pain can be an essential catalyst
toward resilience, self-knowledge, and compassion. Friedrich Nietzsche
famously stated, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Viktor
Frankl, a renowned psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor, thought that
in our suffering we could discover profound meaning.
Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Rilke, and other writers, poets, and
philosophers have likewise held deep convictions about the metamorphoses
and purposes to be found in misery. So, in sum, if you feel like hell,
chill. You’re human. Be with those feelings; see what they might mean to you and know that they’re temporary.

Idea #3: You should be afraid.

“Nature
loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that
commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream
and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the
trick. […] This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the
abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

Terence McKenna

In
numerous ways, society implicitly communicates to us that the world is a
harsh and frightening place. As mentioned above, we’re implored to
meticulously design our future, to plan the “secure” career - the sure
bet, the foolproof strategy. Risky, bold, or unpopular decisions are
thus necessarily presented to us as avoidable traps. Caution is
portrayed as the only way to ensure success. Anything that thousands or
millions of other people aren’t already doing is likely to be met with
unease from our parents, counselors, coaches, and advisors.

Moreover, the entirety of
the outside world becomes something to fear if one invests in
mass-media narratives (something all too easy to do, consciously or
unconsciously). Every other news story is a sexual assault or homicide
or bombing or school shooting or shocking accident. The news is
over-saturated with exceptionally enraging, fear-inducing, and
unsettling stories. This pattern communicates an inaccurate image of
a world where death and danger lurk in every shadowed alley. That’s not
to say that there isn’t a whole lot of frankly fucked up garbage
happening in this world. There is, and we should keep our wits
about us, have compassion for all, and care about helping to develop
more effective systems and a sense of global solidarity.

But the point is that the media skews our perception, exaggerating stories for shock value and subtly conditioning us to expect highly
improbable events to affect us. We’re taught to look out at the world
and see tragedies rather than possibilities. This situation and other
sources of fear become further reasons to take the cautious life-path
that is advertised to us in schools and acted out all around us by the
majority of citizens.

But
when fear dictates our lives, we almost inevitably avoid things that
beckon to us. Often times, the things that you really want to do - the
stand-up comedy bit, the backpacking trip abroad, the music project,
etc. - are petrifying. God forbid, we might not get the result we want or
be laughed at by other people. This fear prevents most of us from “doing
our thing” - i.e. expressing ourselves openly and honestly in our
lives/actions, flowing intelligently with our nature. I have my fair
share of fears and anxieties, but I refuse to be reduced and controlled
by them - I let them be and try always to do the personally meaningful
things that arise organically within me. To invoke Vonnegut once more:
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings
on the way down.”

Idea #4: The products can fix you.

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

David Foster Wallace

The subtext of 99% of advertising for consumer products is this: “You’re inadequate, ugly, uncool, no fun, average, predictable, prudish, and inessential, but our product can fix you.“As
Wallace points out in the above quote, advertisements are designed to
foster in us a sense of anxiety about some aspect of our lives, to give
us a sense that something is missing, but that the emptiness can be
dispelled “for just $19.95!.”

This is the rhetoric of consumerist culture, and goddammit it is effective.
I mean, look around you. People are working endless hours, week after
week, year after year, just to throw it all away on a TV with
imperceptibly higher resolution, an upgrade for their perfectly
functional cell phone, silicone body parts and liposuction, a new
wardrobe that won’t be “stylish” by next year, janky and extraneous
gadgetry, plastic fruit, lawn ornaments, ShamWows, skin creams, throw
pillows, diet pills, and infinite other bits of trivial bullshit.

The obvious point is that if any of this rubbish actually rectified
the void that people try so desperately to remove from their lives,
they’d stop buying. But they don’t - because making a purchase is simple
and addictive and because the jolt of relief and satisfaction that
arises from purchasing is fleeting as it is liberating. Rather than
being any sort of real solution, consumption is merely a cyclic
distraction. No amount of external accumulation can resolve internal
issues and conflicts. These things require time, reflection,
introspection, and a willingness to countenance unsexy truths about
ourselves/life. It’s no surprise that most people try to escape this
oft-uncomfortable work.

Idea #5: There are “good” people and there are “bad” people.

We
all remember hearing things like “Be a good girl, Wilma.” or “Don’t be a
naughty little boy, Sigmund.” From a young age, we were introduced to a
set of ethical rules - rules which determined whether a person was “good”
or “bad.” Most of the stories we grew up with, whether in the form of
movies or books, contained morally unambiguous characters - that is,
heroes and villains, the “good guys” and the “bad guys.”

Furthermore, those of us who were indoctrinated into certain Western religious institutions were taught that the species Homo sapiens is
inherently sinful, and that some “good” people go to a Heaven while
other “bad” people burn for eternity in Hell. In the US, at least,
criminals are typically viewed not as fallible humans who made a
mistake, but as irrevocably evil men who deserve decades-long prison
sentences or capital punishment, rather than a second chance or
rehabilitation.

This
dichotomy of “good” and “bad” is firmly established in Western culture.
It burrows deep into our fundamental conception of the world,
generating guilt, shame, and doubt regarding our actions. I don’t deny
that people are shitheads at times. Some of us do downright hideous
things, and all of us make regrettable errors and end up
hurting ourselves and other people we would rather not have hurt. The
problem with a cultural dichotomy of “good” and “bad” is that it
suggests to us that any one ephemeral mistake could have lifelong consequences, could prove that we are just downright “bad” people.

Though
I personally feel we should hold ourselves largely accountable for our
actions (while viewing ourselves and others with compassion), we must
recognize that numerous factors beyond our control contribute to our
mental state and impulses at any given time. As humans, it is a given that
we will falter at some point. “The deck is stacked against us,” I often
say. We will fuck up, but we will also do generous, loving things.
These two poles arise mutually within us, and one allows us to
experience the other, and vice versa. We are neither purely “good” nor purely “bad.” Kahlil Gibran knew this when he wrote:

“You are good in countless ways, and you
are not evil when you are not good,
You are only loitering and sluggard.
Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness
to the turtles.”

Judging
someone else to be a “bad” person is an exercise in subtle
self-aggrandizement, and conversely, dwelling in excessive guilt or
shame over our mistakes is entirely counterproductive. As Albert Ellis
once pointed out,
the most effective way to express remorse for our actions is to
acknowledge that what we did was misguided and then to focus on doing
better now - in the moment we can still influence.

The
other thing to consider is that both “good” and “bad” might be wholly
native to the human experience and not objectively real. Existence may
well be amoral, as Zen, Taoism,
and other schools of thought suggest. This is one of those arguably
unanswerable questions I mentioned earlier. Either way, I take the
position that a basic moral compass - something as simple as compassion deriving
from a recognition of mutual suffering - is an indispensable component of
a meaningful human life. I humbly submit that we ought to aim for
kindness and understanding, remembering that all people are human, just like us.

Idea #6: You are better than “them.”

We humans naturally form our identities by contrasting ourselves with that which appears different from
us. We call ourselves “artists” or “athletes” because not every person
is creatively expressive or adept at sports. If everyone was, the terms
“artist” and “athlete” would lose their meaning and simply be subsumed
into our “human” identity - the identity we form by contrasting our
physiology with that of other animals. Curiously, all of our
individual identities and even our collective “human” identity are
rendered illusory when we examine ourselves at the atomic or subatomic
level - at this fundamental level, everything is the same - but
most of us don’t focus on this most of the time. Which is okay, because
it’s fun and interesting to lose oneself in the game of human identity
and social existence, wherein distinctions between people are
indispensable for order and civil behavior. But I digress.

Groups - distinct
parcels of people often set in opposition to one another - provide an
ideal opportunity for the sorts of contrasts that we rely on for a sense
of identity. For this reason and others, we in the Western world
endlessly divide ourselves into in-groups and out-groups. We’re jocks,
hipsters, nerds, feminists, Vikings fans, environmentalists, atheists,
Republicans, stoners, frat guys, bikers, vegetarians, transcendental
idealists, et al.

Unfortunately,
this group-based social dynamic is a slippery slope to narcissism and
animosity. A healthy amount of pride in a given community identity can
silently morph into an elitist sense of superiority and a desire to
spite relevant out-groups or
people generally who are not “in the club.” These types of attitudes
have historically been and remain a mainstay in religious organizations,
political parties, races, and social classes, as well as in countless
other niche-groups such as the “popular” kids in a high school or a
segment of health enthusiasts on the Internet or NRA members or all of
the professors in a given department at a university.

Ironically,
if it weren’t for all of the people that are different from you or I,
we would be rendered indistinguishable from one another, retain no shape
to call our own, and the whole game of human identity would be kaput.
As I said above, we create our identities by contrasting ourselves with
that which we are not, so maybe we ought to be thankful for those unlike
us. On a deeper level, we might realize that our personal differences
are illusory and temporary. We invent endless differences in an ongoing
game of human drama when, at root, we are all members of the same
species living on a tiny rock in a mysterious void. Beyond that, we’re
all sentient beings. And beyond that, we’re all star-stuff, energy,
subatomic particles.

Deciding
that “we” are better than “them” has been a fatal error throughout
human history leading to innumerable wars, genocides, and other
unspeakable acts of brutality. We ought to aim to define ourselves first
and foremost as the same fundamental stuff in an unknowable existence
and realize that everything else is a little human game that we’re
playing.

I’ll
leave you with this passage - which echoes my introductory sentiments and
distills the crux of this piece - from the philosopher Robert Anton
Wilson:

“It’s important to
abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of
looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is
to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not
agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one
can only see things according to one’s own belief system, one is
destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It’s only possible
to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it.”